Oddly enough, I’m a capitalist more than a liberal, but I hear your point. I guess my perspective on it is that there’s simply no incentive for any market leaders to close the gap between those with access and those without. I love watching the new efforts to bring WiFi and other access to whole communities with one of the majol beneficiaries being underserved markets (poor, rural, elderly, etc), but providing access without a mechanism to use it is stupid. Obviously, you don’t think that we should’ve built the interstate highway system without a considerable number of people owning cars, right? The auto was around for 60+ years before the interstate system was created. Same goes for electricity - the Feds stepped in and regulated it to make sure that rural populations got taken care of just as well as urban ones. Those moves made a huge difference in the nation’s prospects, in so many ways as to be futile to try and name them all.

My point wasn’t that the g’ment should be giving every poor person a free computer. Well… maybe it was, indirectly. It’s been 30 years since the personal computer was available. I’m thinking it’s one of those things that everyone should have by now. Like a phone (99% penetration) or a television (95%) or a pen (um…). I do think that more incentives should be created to drive innovation that makes personal computing ubiquitous. I know the captains of silicon valley would differ with me, but they’ve only just recently in the last 7 years or so decided to go down market to capture growth. And frankly, they’ve already made their billions. Let’s move on to what we can accomplish next with everyone having a PC and access to knowledge and each other the world over.

Om Malik recently wrote up that he didn’t feel that the US was lagging behind on broadband deployment. And falls into _exactly_ the fallacies that I point

Your first point is to look at absolute users. This is unfair to smaller countries. Are you saying that Belgium will never be as successful in broadband as the US unless everyone there gets 3.5 broadband connections each and the US stops growing tomorrow?

Secondly, your article doesn’t address the issue of differing household density. Everyone in a household can have a mobile phone so population penetration is appropriate there. On the other hand, each household is only likely to have one broadband connection (if we leave aside the issue of business connections) so household penetration is more relevant. The number/% of population that has broadband subscriptions does not show what percentage of the population has access to broadband. However, taking this to the other extreme, you could also say that any country that has high-speed internet cafes has 100% population coverage because everyone has access.

I also have to take issue with Mr Leichtman’s analysis that 25% of households don’t have computers so therefore should not be included. Just because you don’t have one yet doesn’t mean you won’t have one in the future. Even if you do accept his point, it’s not like other countries have a computer for every person. The segments of the population that should be excluded are those that can’t be reached at the point the survey is made – no telephone line or out of reach of a satellite (or no electricity).

I could go on and on, but I won’t – as I have to go home for dinner. I’m also aware that it’s easy to criticise but hard to create – and my work is torn to pieces on a daily basis. As a parting shot though, I will say that America is often touted as the biggest, the best, the most advanced, blah, blah, blah – please let someone else win for a change.

Data-bandwidth, access, and availability should certainly be a main social, industrial AND political priority. Some countries, as mentioned in the previous posts, have made bandwidth and availability/access a governmental/policy priority as a means of driving, monitoring and focusing economic and social development.

Cultural values, social trends and financial/industry strategy related to these notions in the US is rooted in a different soil psychologically though. It would be interesting to study in-depth different aspects of these issues in an academic and intellectual manner.

Great discussion, y’all!

Om is wrong; real broadband to the home is 10MB/s symmetrical; neither Canada nor the USA have this in widespread …

Can you imagine what our nation would’ve looked like in the last 100 years if the federal government would not have mandated electricity deployment? Or standardized the rail system? Or driven the interstate road system?

It’s not a comparison of whether we have more territory than South Korea, or whether we have more rural users than Singapore. The point is that those nations have made a conscious and adept decision to provide broadband access to their entire citizenry in an effort to unleash the potential developments which will UNDOUBTEDLY be built upon that platform. The fact that the US hasn’t even provided a damn computer for its citizens under the same notion as running water and electricity is a stagering miscalculation of economic development.

I’m sure when the cure for cancer is developed, you’ll have to buy that too.

(link)